Flying with frozen/nonfrozen milk...

I will be going on a 10 day trip tomorrow (with 4 mo LO), and need to pump while I am gone to have enough supply for the weekend after I get back on a Wednesday - I'm in a fancy wedding and LO will be with sitters for several hours Friday and Saturday.

I'm guessing if all goes well the milk would be out of fridge/freezer for 6 hours between getting to/from the airport and the flight itself.

I'm wondering if I should freeze it all... does anyone have experience with how long it stays frozen with ice packs in an insulated pack? My fear is it will partially thaw. Some resources say it needs to be used within 24 hours then, others seem to say it's fine to re-freeze. I have glass bottles to freeze in, which takes longer to thaw than bags.

The other option is to not freeze, but only bring the milk from the last 4 days home on the plane (so less milk overall, but no thawing risk...) and then freeze it when I get back.

I also thought I could ask to put the milks or even rotate the ice packs in a freezer on the plane - but thought they might be strict about that and say no.

Thoughts? Not sure what to do, or how big the risk is with bending the rules a little... I haven't gone back to work yet so I am pretty new to the pumping/storage world. Thanks!

Re: Flying with frozen/nonfrozen milk...

you won't really need to store very much milk while you're away. aim for 1-1.5 oz per hour while away, so if you're away "several" hours friday that's, what, something like 6 oz? and you'll be pumping at least once on friday while you're away from baby, so you can feed that saturday, right?

have you tried pumping yet? do you know how much you can get from a pump session while you're fullptime feee=ding (ie "extra"?)

anyway, i would not freeze the milk, i'd just pump the last few days on vacation and keep it fresh. i wouldn't re-freeze thawed milk, so i wouldn't take the risk of it thawing and needing to use it up before friday. i also would store in milk bags for the airplane - way easier to travel with. put the pumped milk in storage bags, put them all in a ziploc, put that in a cooler with a separate ziplock of ice which you can dump right before security and then an extra dry ziplock you can refill from a restaurant right after security - i got hassled when my ice melted a little and then that was "unapproved liquid". if you don't open the cooler for anything else, it should stay cold enough with no problem. i would not expect to be able to use the plane freezer at all.

and depending on how much you can pump, i'd plan to pump on thursday when you're home as well and maybe you won't even need to do all this pumping and flying with milk pain.